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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Jumping Off a Cliff... into Space

Staying with the space related theme from the previous article, today's post ventures a little bit past Earth's atmosphere to show you the first NASA spacewalk.

The amazing photograph above shows astronaut Ed White, pilot of NASA's Gemini 4 mission, on the first ever US spacewalk or more technically speaking, extra-vehicular activity. This wasn't the first occasion of an EVA as the honor of the first ever space walk goes to cosmonaut Alexey Leonov.

Even without going into details of how this photograph was made, this is an amazing image every time you look at it; a close crop of a free floating spaceman against the darkness of space on one side and the vibrant blue Earth on the other side.

Symbolically speaking, the tether attached to the astronaut looks more like an umbilical cord, and the whole scene is evocative of man's attempt to free itself of the binding ties to its mother Earth. With all of the advancements of man at that time and even with the purportedly coming Singularity a few decades away, the photo somehow shows that humans are still grounded in some way and will never be entirely free of their physical limitation.

While the image is truly iconic, it is sad to note that astronaut Ed White died in the Apollo 1 cabin fire. The memory of his life and work will live on in this great picture.

Ahhh...Space. While I encourage and push for space travel and exploration, I know that I will never be one of the people that actually goes UP THERE. Never been a big fan of the whole threat of decompression. :/